Worth reading: "Why Obama is wrong about our schools"

But first, from David Marshak, long a critic of No Child Left Behind and "obsessive" testing:

"...when it comes to education, President Obama is a hypocrite. He sends his own kids to a progressive, child-centered school. The school enrolls 1097 students in 13 grades, about 100 per grade. It’s small and personalized. It focuses on its students as whole persons.

"You don’t hear anything like this kind of language coming from Obama or Arne Duncan when it comes to education policy."

Schools which hold teachers strictly accountable for student test scores --that's pay for performance, isn't it?-- are anything but child-centered.

The piece worth reading, "Why Obama is wrong", was written by Los Angeles teacher Randy Childs, a member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, a union affiliated with both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.

Childs accuses Obama of neoliberalism, intent on foisting market-based reforms on America's public schools:

"Tellingly, just hours after making his speech on education, Obama proclaimed himself a 'New Democrat,' identifying himself with the conservative faction of his party--the very people who have championed charter schools, merit pay and other attacks on teachers in the name of 'school reform.' "

"New Democrat" means neoliberal. 

Take charter schools, for example, Obama's favored "reform":

"Charter schools have become Corporate America's most successful method of introducing privatization and market-style competition into public education. That's right--the same free-market dynamics that have wreaked havoc in the fields of health care, housing and high finance are coming to education.

"Supporters of charter schools describe them as laboratories of pedagogical innovation. In practice, most 'high-performing' charter schools cherry-pick students and families that are already enjoying academic success and dump the children they find inconvenient to teach back into the mainstream public school system."

And then there's "merit pay", based on the supposed superiority of private sector employment practices, the underlying assumptions of which have never been thoroughly, or even cursorily, examined.  Childs writes:

"Plus, there's a very simple problem with the logic of 'performance pay' for teachers. There is no honest scientific method by which 'excellence in the classroom' can be quantified."

He's got that right.  And for that, perhaps Randy Childs deserves a boost in pay --"merit pay", if you will.

(NOTE:  Childs' piece is published on the Socialist Worker website.  I don't know if Childs is a Marxist/Communist/Socialist, but the very fact that his criticism of Obama, at least on education policy, is carried on a "socialist" website should acquit Obama of the charge --the latest by Iowa Republican Charles Grassley-- that his policies are fundamentally socialist.)